


Wonderful

by mystery_deer



Category: Choice of Games, Créme de la Créme (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Bad Parenting, Fluff, I'm living my best life this is pure hedonism, Light Angst, M/M, but it's really only implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:02:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24462472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystery_deer/pseuds/mystery_deer
Summary: A phonecall, making a home.
Relationships: male protagonist/Eugene Hartmann
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Wonderful

Sun streamed in through the small window overlooking Jett’s room, painting him in a pale yellow glow. He squinted for a moment and then closed his eyes, giving in to the warmth. Yellows and reds and oranges danced in the darkness of his eyelids and he watched the colors sway. Hartmann picked up on the third ring. 

“Hello, Hartmann residence”  
“‘S me.”  
“Oh! Hello Jett.” He could hear voices in the background, children screaming in the way kids do where you can’t tell if they’re having fun or being tortured. “We weren’t scheduled to call for another hour.”

“I missed you.” Jett admitted, twirling the chord of his phone around his finger. He paused, suddenly self-conscious. “Is that a problem?”

“No! No. I...just wouldn’t want you to think I was ignoring you if I didn’t pick up in time.” Jett laughed.   
“Nah, you wouldn’t do that.” Hartmann wasn’t the type to ignore people. If anything he was way too invested in others, what they thought, what they were doing - Jett had once snuck out of class (“Mr.Griffith may I use the restroom?” / “If you _must._ ”) and spotted Hartmann and a Starling he recognized looking over papers together.

“It’s a simple mistake really, here - you used the wrong word. ‘Tarte’ instead of ‘Cordonnier’. And you forgot the accent over the e.” The girl grumbled and snatched her notebook back, letting stray papers float to the ground.

“Yeah, whatever. I know, I’m dumb. Whatever.” Hartmann bent down to pick them up, saying something Jett couldn’t hear. He climbed out the window and onto the branch of a nearby tree that Mr.Blanchard kept threatening to have Karson cut down if he found more students sitting up there during classes. (“I swear I see more feet hanging down from those branches then fruit!”)

“-Because you said it was simple!”  
“Meaning it’s easy to fix.” Hartmann said, shuffling the papers until they were all perfectly in line with each other. “The fact that the only errors I see are simple ones is a good sign.”

The girl had hesitated a moment before grabbing the papers from him and grinning, slapping a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a good guy Hartmann!” She exclaimed, rushing off in the other direction. “Thanks a bunch!”

Jett had seen her later that day sitting under the bleachers and writing furiously in that same notebook, muttering under her breath. _“Je suis désolé, mon français n'est pas très bon...J'ai eu une soixantaine sur mon dernier test, bien mieux que le dernier...dis à grand-père que j'ai adoré la cordonnier aux pêches qu'il m'a envoyée...J'espère pouvoir visiter cet été…”_

Jett wondered if he could ask Hartmann to say something to him in french but blushed at the idea of him saying even mundane phrases like _“Voulez-vous du thé?”_ and _“J'ai deux frères”_ Surely his heart would explode at _“Je t’aime”_. Which was the only phrase he knew. He’d learned it from his mother a long time ago, who told him to remember it like his name. _Je tt ahm. JE ttahm._ He wondered if Hartmann’s mother taught him when he was little or if it was all tutors.

“So how’s it going? Your brothers giving you a tough time?” He couldn’t imagine having siblings. Max had a sister and Freddie had too many to keep track of. Both of them said it was hard and Max even said he hated his sister sometimes, but there was always a warmth that came from them whenever they talked about their families. 

He’d told Hartmann that he didn’t want to go home and see his family. He’d expected him to say something about trying to get along or make a remark about his parents’ status but all he’d said was; _“Hmm. Yes, that can be tough.”_ In a voice so soft he wasn’t sure it was his. In that moment he’d wanted to ask more, wanted to grab his hand and tell him not to go home.

Instead he’d made some sort of joke-pun on charcuterie. You’re cute me? Something along those lines. The entire train ride home he’d worried, a knot forming in the pit of his stomach.

“Well I wouldn’t say tough but they are becoming quite the handful.” There was the sound of a door being closed and the screaming quieted down. Jett wondered what Hartmann’s bedroom looked like. His section of their dorm was sparse, only the necessities and errant scraps of paper were there. No posters or trinkets like everyone else. “Jett?”

“Sorry, nodding off a bit.”  
“Hm.” They lapsed into a pleasant silence before Jett broke it with a yawn. “Do you need to rest?”  
“No, I want to talk to you.”  
“I...alright.” Jett smiled slightly, picturing him looking all flustered. He was always taken aback when he said things like that, it made him want to say them all the time. _I love you, I miss you, I like you._

“Where are you?”  
“Home, my bedroom.”  
“Describe it!”  
“Why?”  
“I want to know where the great Eugene Hartmann resides! Oh how the other half lives…”  
“You lived in a veritable castle up until recently if memory serves.”  
“That’s a common misconception, it was a house ON castle hill. There was only like one castle there and no one even lived in it, it was a museum or something.”

He wondered if Hartmann liked museums. He seemed like he would, they were pretty boring and educational. Jett didn’t care much about long-dead royalty. He didn’t care much for current royalty, he thought, conjuring up The Honorable Auguste’s image in his mind. He wasn’t royalty (serves him right) but he could remember the face Hartmann had made in that carriage, all fluttery hands and nervous blushing. In that moment the thought _I want to make him do that_ rushed through his mind so fast he hadn’t even registered it until later, when he was standing in the cold and fishing for Hartmann’s eye.

“My room isn’t anything special. I have a bed...I’m sitting by my desk right now, it has a splendid view of the sea. I used to let the sound of the waves lull me to sleep as a child, it gets so quiet up here.” A beat of silence. “I love the beach.”

“Yeah, my parents have a summer home up there. At least I think we still have it.” He must have let too much emotion slip into that last statement because Hartmann made a nervously sympathetic noise. 

“How is your family?”   
“Fine.”   
“Are you-”  
“I don’t really want to talk about it.” Jett snapped, rolling onto his side and curling up into a ball. He heard Hartmann say something, an apology most likely, but the receiver was too far away to hear him. 

The knot in his chest had only gotten bigger the moment he stepped into the new apartment. It was...he didn’t want to be a snob but it felt so...foreign. Guilt stabbed at his gut as Freddie’s face came to mind. He was a terrible friend, a terrible person. 

“-I’m really sorry, are you there? Can you please talk to me?” Hartmann was saying as Jett pulled the receiver close again.   
“No, I’m sorry. You didn’t- sorry. God I’m being such a dick.”  
“Language.” Hartmann said softly and Jett smiled slightly.   
“Sorry.”  
“It’s alright.” Jett closed his eyes. The sun was no longer shining on him and the colors he could see in shadow were indescribable. 

“Hey, Eugene?” Had he ever called him that before? Was it rude? They had kissed and held hands and all but this felt...deeply, softly intimate. He heard a gasp on the other end of the phone and when Hartmann spoke again it was with a highly practiced artificial ease.  
“...Yes?”

“Do you think your parents love you?” He realized a second too late that that was a very loaded question and quickly elaborated. “I mean ‘cause I...I know mine do? Like, in their way. But I feel like they love me like you love a dumb ol’ dog that’s been in the family for years and is always chewing up your slippers.”

He could picture his parents now; His mom looking through a magazine and marking recipes for the housekeeper to try and his dad reading the paper beside her combing for good gossip. When he was little he’d asked them how they’d met and they said “Our parents introduced us.” At the time he’d imagined a love story, now he saw a business transaction. And they’d got him out of it, a shitty deal. A disappointment all around.

Whenever he thought things like that he’d be split into two.  
_“We’d do anything for you."_  
_“Provided anything could be done."_

“I don’t know, I guess I just wish...I sometimes wish I could be a prize winner like you.” Hartmann laughed sharply without humor.

“Yes, well. None of the prizes I win seem to be enthusiastically received so I suppose we’re in the same boat.” Jett couldn’t imagine Hartmann being unimpressive to anyone. Head prefect, straight A’s, kind, helpful...even Max didn’t really hate him despite calling him a prig sometimes.   
_Me and my folks don’t get along that well.  
Hmm. Yes, that can be tough._

“Well I think you’re great.” A soft exhale of laughter on the other end tugged at the knot in his stomach.  
“Thank you.”  
“I really do you know. You do like...everything. And you do it well.”

“Thank you again, you- ...I admire you too.” Now it was Jett’s turn to laugh. “I’m serious!”  
“Really? What do you admire? How stealthily I can fall asleep in class?”

“How you help others even at the expense of yourself. How you’re so outspoken, unafraid to say what you want or how you think the world should be.” He could hear Hartmann piecing things together in his mind, reviewing words and switching them out for better ones. “I admire...how you told me that you didn’t want to go home.”

Jett let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, heart pounding. “What?” 

“I...I wish I could say it as well.”  
“Say what?”  
“I don’t...I don’t want to go home either.” A pause, a wet cough and then his voice returned, wavering and close to breaking. “I wish I didn’t have to go home.”

Jett listened to Hartmann cry quietly on the other end of the line, muffled by what he suspected was Hartmann’s hand and will. He wondered if he was being quiet for him, for his brothers, or as a natural consequence of being Hartmann. He wished he was there to comfort him, to offer him a shoulder or a hug.

“Next year we won’t have to.” He said instead, sitting up suddenly. “Next year we’ll be- we’ll have graduated and you’ll be a bigshot academic or something and I’ll be your waif and we can go wherever the hell we want for vacation.”

As he spoke the future became more real and solid to him, something that could be reached and achieved rather than a vague concept looming over him - them. “You can bring your brothers and we’ll go somewhere else just as beautiful - the sea is so big. I’ll find somewhere you can see it. Somewhere where the quiet is...where the quiet’s not tense. Just calm.”   
He heard Hartmann sniffle and blow his nose, then a soft chuckle as he brought the receiver back to his mouth. He wanted to kiss him, he would do anything to kiss him right then.  
“You have quite a way with words.” 

Jett smiled, relief flooding through him and loosening the knot even further. He didn’t know if it would ever go away fully as long as they were both locked away in their proverbial towers, but he felt so much better with Hartmann in his ear. Hartmann’s voice slowly and methodically pulling and pinching at the knot until it was a perfect straight line. An arrow pointing forward.

“I have my way with quite a lot of things.” He said, falling back onto the bed as the orange evening sun filled the room with a brilliant light. “So, tell me about your day.”

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:  
> I’m sorry my French isn’t so good...I got a sixty on my last test, better than before...tell grandpa I loved the peach cobbler he sent...I hope I can visit this summer
> 
> Would you like some tea?  
> I have two brothers.  
> I love you.
> 
> (take a drink everytime I wrote 'wonder' in this fic)


End file.
